Sukochev Roman's (Leolik) patched NotifyOSD PPA adds extra features on top of the Ubuntu NotifyOSD notifications, like closing the notifications on click, option to move the notifications to a different screen corner, configurable colors for both the notification background and text, and much more.

A while ago we were telling you about a PPA that provides a package called "xul-ext-indicator" that integrates Thunderbird in the Ubuntu Messaging Menu. This is actually a Thunderbird extension packaged in a .deb so you can easily get updates.

Just one day after we wrote about the Recent Notifications applet, it got a cool new feature but we never got to write about it because of the many news that came up this week.

(NotifyOSD displayed in the bottom-right screen corner)

You probably already know about the NotifyOSD packages patched by Leolik (Sukochev Roman) which allow you to customize the notification bubles (colors, font and so on). Well, the patched NotifyOSD PPA got an update seconds ago which adds further customizations (to which Mark Shuttleworth is completely against) such as: display the notifications in different corners of the screen and also finally fixes the timeout option which was broken since... forever in Ubuntu.

A Google Summer of Code project about NotifyOSD notification was recently brought up for discussion in the Ayatana mailing list. Unfortunately Mark Shuttleworth dismissed almost all the ideas related to NotifyOSD's behavior.

Mark agrees making a GUI you can use to set up the persistence time, UI modifications over a basic structure, font size/style, but that's it.

Here's what Mark Shuttleworth says about 'stacking' (make the bubbles dock downwards as they are initiated and start to stack up as the bubble times finish away) or a close button on NotifyOSD:

Notify OSD has been in Ubuntu for a long time yet for some odd reason, it never supported any kind of customizations so if you wanted to change it's color or position you had to compile it with the new settings.

But there is an Ubuntu PPA with a patched Notify OSD for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx which supports customizations via a simple text file so you don't have to compile it and can change the Notify OSD settings on the fly.

The package in the PPA also uses the old Jaunty way to display Notify OSD meaning the Notify OSD bubbles will always be displayed in the top right corner, not dynamic to allow a gap for sound notifications. But this also can be easily configured using the package in the PPA.

Read on!